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Manal Al-Sharif made a video of herself driving her car, with her face uncovered, in her home city of Khobar. Within a day, it was the most popular video on YouTube in Saudi Arabia. "The video was not only trending in Saudi Arabia, but trending all over the world," she says. After a few days it had over 600,000 views. "There was a comment from an Australian guy -- 'I don't know why people are interested in watching this, it's just a woman driving'. But in Saudi Arabia you can get yourself in jail if you're caught driving as a female."

Al-Sharif, speaking at Wired 2012, describes a country where her friends pay up to a third of their salary on hiring drivers, just to be able to operate in society, and where she has over 30 contacts in her phone just for drivers. She says: "Saudi Arabia is a huge country with no public transportation. I love European cities, you can walk to the shops to buy things, but in Saudi Arabia the cities are not friendly for us pedestrians."

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That restricts the ability of women to participate in civil society, especially in a country with an absolute monarchy and without political representation. Gatherings of more than four people at any time can be broken up by the police, and participants arrested. That has driven Saudi women to go online, to their own "cyber civil society", especially on Twitter.

Al-Sharif points out that the UAE and Saudi Arabia, both similar societies, are the two countries with the highest adoption smartphone adoption rates in the world, higher than either the UK or the US. Saudi Arabia has the greatest number of active Twitter users in the Arab world, and views more videos on Youtube per capita than any other country.

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However, the sexism of Saudi society is manifested in the restriction of web access for women -- only three out of every ten women is able to get online, according to Al-Sharif, compared to a world average of five out of ten. "Why?" she asks. "It's down to societal limitations, privacy and security, and ICT literacy.

Believe me, recording a video, using my name, uncovering my face, that was offensive to the men of my country."

Al-Sharif is now running a campaign called Women2Drive: "We wanted all women, one day, to have a license, and to drive. We face so much harrassment. In societies that are not used to being tolerant, what happens? They start coming for you. They will do anything to break you, to make you unsure of what you think, to break you inside. They'll make threats, they'll say horrible things about you."

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A striking example of this is that last year it was reported in many western media outlets that she had died in a car crash. "My boss called me early in the morning, asking 'are you OK, are you alive, I just read your death news in the Guardian!'" She went on Twitter to rebuke them, and contacted newspapers like the Guardian, but, she says, "according to them, I'm still dead". She and her family have received death threats, simply because she wants the right to drive.

Campaigning to change a society like Saudi Arabia, where women are expected to get written permission from a guardian to do things, might seem daunting, but Al-Sharif is not unbowed. "In any society if you come up with a new idea,society will split into 20/20/60. 20 percent will support you from the start, 20 percent will do anything they can to stop you, and the 60 percent, the silent majority, will just watch the game. It's hard to convince the other 20 percent, but that silent majority is waiting to see what happens, and it's your responsibility to try to get them to support your idea."